ICT news

• NATO Will Deploy Unmanned Vessels to Protect Baltic Sea Cables - Plus Data-Assessing AI

  18-01-2025 23:18 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The BBC brings news from the Baltic Sea. After critical undersea cables were damaged or severed last year, "NATO has launched a new mission to increase the surveillance of ships..."Undersea infrastructure is essential not only for electricity supply but also because more than 95% of internet traffic is secured via undersea cables, [said NATO head Mark Rutte], adding that "1.3 million kilometres (800,000 miles) of cables guarantee an estimated 10 trillion-dollar worth of financial transactions ev
  
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• Proposed New York Law Could Require Background Checks Before Buying 3D Printers

  18-01-2025 22:18 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A new law is being considered by New York's state legislature, reports a local news outlet. "if passed, will require anyone buying a 3D printer to pass a background check. If you can't legally own a firearm, you won't be able to buy one of these printers..."It is illegal to print most gun parts in New York. Attorney Greg Rinckey believes the proposal is an overreach. "I think this is also gonna face some constitutional problems. I mean, it really comes down to a legal parsing of what are you pri
  
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• Arrested by AI: When Police Ignored Standards After AI Facial-Recognition Matches

  18-01-2025 21:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  A county transit police detective fed a poor-quality image to an AI-powered facial recognition program, remembers the Washington Post, leading to the arrest of "Christopher Gatlin, a 29-year-old father of four who had no apparent ties to the crime scene nor a history of violent offenses." He was unable to post the $75,000 cash bond required, and "jailed for a crime he says he didn't commit, it would take Gatlin more than two years to clear his name."
  A Washington Post investigation into police u
  
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• America's Top Three Insurers Reaped $7.3 Billion From Their Drug-Middlemen's Markups, FTC Says

  18-01-2025 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News.
  The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday."
  The top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx — generated roughly $7.3 billion through price hikes over a
  
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• Visiting the Roman Space Telescope - as It's Being Assembled

  18-01-2025 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth," writes the Washington Post. "But first it has to be put together, piece by piece, in a cavernous chamber at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."
  One long-time NASA worker calls it "the largest clean room in the free world," and the Post notes everyone wears white gowns and surgical masks "to keep hardware from being contaminated by hu
  
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• World's First AI Chatbot, ELIZA, Resurrected After 60 Years

  18-01-2025 17:34 via slashdot.org
  
  "Scientists have just resurrected 'ELIZA,' the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code," reports LiveScience, "and it still works extremely well." (Click in the vintage black-and-green rectangle for a blinking-cursor prompt...)
  Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the
  
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• 'Career Catfishing' - 34% of Gen Z Workers Didn't Show Up for a New Job

  18-01-2025 16:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  From the New York Post:
  Generation Z's recent foray into the corporate world has been an eye-popping escapade plagued by their "annoying" workplace habits and helicopter parents accompanying them on interviews. Now, newcomers to the 9-to-5 grind are inflicting a fresh new level of hell onto the workforce with a trending act of defiance known as "career catfishing."
  That means "a successful candidate accepted a job and then never showed up," writes Fortune, citing a survey of 1,000 U.K. employees
  
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• Bumble Founder Returns As CEO Amid a Dating App Decline

  18-01-2025 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as CEO at the beginning of 2024, is returning to the post in mid-March. Former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, who succeeded Herd, has resigned for "personal reasons" and will remain in the role until Wolfe Herd takes over. "As I step into the role of CEO, I'm energized and fully committed to Bumble's success, our mission of creating meaningful, equitable relationships, and our op
  
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• Nintendo Addresses Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Credits Controversy

  18-01-2025 11:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country Returns HD earlier this week, with fans noticing that the original team members at Retro are not individually credited in the updated version. "Instead, the credits state that it was 'based on the work' of Retro Studios, while the team at Forever Entertainment gets its credits for working on the remaster," reports GameSpot. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, a Nintendo spokesperson said: "We believe in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or c
  
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• Meteorite Crash In Canada Is Caught By Home Security Camera

  18-01-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alber
  
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• OpenAI Has Created an AI Model For Longevity Science

  18-01-2025 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI has developed a language model designed for engineering proteins, capable of converting regular cells into stem cells. It marks the company's first venture into biological data and demonstrates AI's potential for unexpected scientific discoveries. An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review:Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was "confident" his company knows how to build an AGI, adding that "superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery an
  
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• EV, Hybrid Sales Reached Record 20% of US Vehicle Sales In 2024

  18-01-2025 02:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids reached 20% of new car sales in the U.S. last year, with Tesla maintaining dominance in the EV market despite a slight decline in market share. CNBC reports: Auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports more than 3.2 million "electrified" vehicles were sold last year, or 1.9 million hybrid vehicles, including plug-in models, and 1.3 million all-electric models. Traditional vehicles with gas or diesel internal combustion engines still made up the majority of sa
  
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• FDIC Sues 17 Former Silicon Valley Bank Execs Over Collapse

  18-01-2025 01:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  "The FDIC sued 17 former executives and directors of Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty," reports Reuters. The move comes almost two years after Silicon Valley Bank's March 2023 collapse, which shocked financial markets and ended up benefiting big players like JPMorgan Chase. From the report: In a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the FDIC, in its capacity the bank's receiver, said the
  
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• Google Reports Halving Code Migration Time With AI Help

  18-01-2025 01:02 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Google computer scientists have been using LLMs to streamline internal code migrations, achieving significant time savings of up to 89% in some cases. The findings appear in a pre-print paper titled "How is Google using AI for internal code migrations?" The Register reports: Their focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas, such as Ads, Search, Workspace and YouTube, instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services like code completion, code review, and
  
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• RedNote May Wall Off 'TikTok Refugees' To Prevent US Influence On Chinese Users

  18-01-2025 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader tlhIngan writes: In what is perhaps the greatest irony ever, the operators of RedNote (known as Xiaohongshu) have decided to "wall off" US TikTok refugees fleeing to its service as the TikTok ban looms. The reason? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants to prevent American influence from spreading to Chinese citizens. The ban is expected to be in place next week, while many believe that the influx of Americans to be temporary and just a reaction to the TikTok ban to mov
  
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